My friends and I participated in RidgeHacks 2024 today, the premier hackathon at Ridge High School. We came in 2nd out of 22 teams (consisting of primarily high school teams) by programming an application named 'Graze'. We were able to beat multiple teams from BRHS, our district's high school, along with top teams from other high schools from all across New Jersey. With this accomplishment, we were able to win hundreds of dollars in prizes (estimated to be around $500-$675) and get featured in the BRHS C.O.D.E. club's Google Classroom. You can check out our GitHub repository here and our Devpost submission here.
Here's the story. So basically, I arrived at Ridge High School at around 8:15, and I found that Dhruv, our backend expert, was already there waiting for me. Then, Tharun, our designer, joined us for the opening ceremony at around 8:30. We had breakfast at 9:00, and hacking began, which meant that we started working on our project 'Graze', which we had discussed and came up with before the hackathon, so we would be prepared and wouldn't have to waste time once the 12 hours officially started.
Dhruv was able to build the simple version of the backend first, along with HTML code that functioned but with no extra details or CSS, which, if you don't know, is a pretty boring and unattractive application. We then spent the next couple of hours creating and editing the user interface by editing the HTML and CSS and adding in new pages, new functions, and new elements, such as the gallery and information contained on the homepage. I added in the navigation bar the homepage 'what is it?' section, the team members cards, along with a footer and other things for other pages of the application.
We then spent many hours fixing and revising this code, as we had to identify many issues with the HTML, and sometimes the CSS would make our website look off and a bit weird instead of accomplishing our goal of neatening and organizing elements. We then went through the many parts of our application step by step (the painful code part), and Dhruv learned about how to make multiple functions in Flask on the spot during the hackathon.
In the last few hours, we added a gallery where people could share their artwork instead of just uploading it to 'Graze'. Surprisingly, this was actually not too hard to make, and we got the HTML, CSS, and Flask working within the first 5 tries. I think the hardest pages were the authentication pages (Login and Sign Up) and the homepage (the homepage was hard because of the sheer amount of information and dependencies that we put on it).
We finalized our project around an hour before submission time by checking for bugs and removing them. We checked our code and wrote a paragraph in Devpost to finish off our project. We made sure everything was well done, deleted all the redundant code, and organized code and files to be more concise.
We had Tharun's friend, Calum, record our submission video, which I think turned out pretty well, and we submitted our code literally 2 minutes before the deadline. We then sat nervously, wondering if we would be in the top 5 (the top 5 moved on to the next round of judging and is known as a 'finalist'). When everyone went to the auditorium, 'Graze' was called in the top five as a finalist (nice), and we had to make a presentation now in a couple minutes for the next round of judging. We ended up talking about research, our code, how it works, and showing off our project and our brilliant user reviews. We actually thought we were going to finish in 4th place, so when we were called for 2nd place, we were really happy.
To end off, RidgeHacks 2024 was a great experience, and I think my team worked really well.
